How to get external notifications into magento

Question

I am in interested in creating notification badges in magento for external applications such as email, crm, customer cat, etc. i recently created links in magento's admin panel to redirect to my email, CRM system, etc. But i would also like to add notification badges to this.

Could you guys suggests ways to import notifications from external sources (email client/server, etc.)into magento?

Answer 1

You could use Magento's System->Notification system - the one that tells you about security patches, upgrades and the sort. The notifications appear right underneath the menu in the admin panel.

You'd need to do some custom development, but you should be able to easily hook into it with maybe one or two class rewrites. Also have a look at the following classes Mage_Adminhtml_NotificationController and Mage_AdminNotification_Model_Inbox.

edit:

There are a couple of blog-posts about what I mean:

• http://inchoo.net/magento/magento-frontend/utilizing-magento-notification-system/
• https://www.nicksays.co.uk/magento-custom-admin-notifications/